Last week, news aggregator Inshorts announced a major change in its leadership structure. While cofounder Azhar Iqubal stepped away as CEO to become chairman of the 11-year-old company, the other founder Deepit Purkayastha took over at the helm.

The company’s statement said Purkayastha would lead the company into “the next phase of growth” but the route is certainly not going to be scenic, as Inshorts will have to take a number of tough decisions along the way.

That’s because, in the background, the Delhi NCR-based company itself is morphing from being a news aggregator to a full-fledged social media content platform. In the process, Inshorts is running precariously close to regulatory guardrails for digital media platforms, and also risks losing its news-first identity.

According to sources close to the company, Inshorts is testing a new feature within its app akin to X (FKA Twitter) or LinkedIn, aimed at original content generated by some of the biggest influencers in India. The app is said to be luring top influencers and podcasters from LinkedIn, X and YouTube for the launch.

With this, Inshorts is directly taking on the likes of Sharechat, Sharechat’s Moj (short video), Dailyhunt’s Josh, Inmobi’s Roposo and others in the social media space, not to mention X, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube and other behemoths.

This is an incredibly tight field for a new app with a similar offering, and moreover we have seen the Indian social media thesis has not resulted in monetisation at scale. The examples of Sharechat and others have been well reported.

The First Decade Of Inshorts

It all started as a Facebook page in 2013. Iqubal, an IIT Delhi third year student, dropped out to startup with two fellow IIT students. The Facebook page showed a snappy summary of the major news stories of the day and its success spurred the launch of Inshorts or News In Shorts.

The first funding round came three months later as Inshorts had seemingly struck a goldmine with its product idea, which was entirely new for the Indian market.

The app grew in popularity and so did the valuation of the company, which was around $550 Mn at the last funding round of $60 Mn which came in July 2021. The startup is backed by the likes of Lee Fixel’s Addition, Tiger Global, SIG, A91 Partners and Tanglin Venture Partners.

According to Statista, Google News currently occupies 55% of the market share in the news-aggregator space, followed by Dailyhunt (35%) and Inshorts (17%).

Amid this growth, it’s hard to deny that Iqubal is the face of the company in many regards.

The 31-year-old former CEO’s public image is undoubtedly helped by his appearance on Shark Tank India, where he is the youngest of the celebrity investors.

Inshorts is pretty much one of the standout examples of the Indian startup ecosystem’s growth. The app primarily targetted users in the age group of 20-35........

© Inc42